As the cache turns – September 2018

This blog post is the first in what we intend to be a series of newsletter style monthly(-ish) blog posts. Cachetur.no has always been open, and to ensure that we stay open we want to use this newsletter to share information about what’s going on.

The previous month has been vacation time for cachetur.no HQ, and the summer months were a bit slow as well. But most of you have probably not even noticed that, except from the lack of updates in the changelog.

The ambassador team has done a magnificent job handling all incoming support requests, both on the site itself, on Facebook and in the cachetur.no Community. They deserve a huge thank you for that! They continue to handle a lot of this, giving me more time to focus on the development. Ambassadors, you rock!

Recent changes

As previously mentioned, we haven’t done much during the last month. But we did take the time during our vacation to add a couple things.

Yesterday we also activated the Czech translation on cachetur.no. Czech is the sixth language we support, and it was made possible by the work of QuoX, petruv, Asteerix and Jane9133. Well done!

Things we’re working on now

Right now we’re working on organizing all requests, ideas and bug reports we got during our vacation. I am the only developer, and I do have a day job and like to geocache myself as well. So please understand that while we want to implement your idea as fast as we can, it will take some time.

Once I have caught up, and have finished merging the list of summer ideas/requests with the global list, I will slowly start working on the site again. The app was brand new this summer, and as expected we do have a lot of ideas to work on. Please take the time to complete our app survey.

Things we intend to work on soon

We have two major tasks we have to work on during the last months of the year. The app, and migrating to the new Geocaching.com API.

We have deliberately waited with the second one, as the new API was missing a lot compared to the old. Much has been added now, and we should be able to start migrating soon. This won’t affect you, but it will take development resources.

There’s also a lot of other minor changes we want to do, and we are considering adding logging functionality to cachetur.no (allowing you to log your finds directly from cachetur.no).

We also want to look into improving the route optimization process, and moving it from client-side to server-side optimization. Which will make it a lot faster and more intuitive to use.

Upcoming events

Attending a cachetur.no event, class, talk etc. is a nice way to learn more about the site. Our wonderful ambassadors, and even some really cool users, will be attending several events during the next months.

Event

Region

What

September 20thGC7WRTM Let’s take a cachetur

Washington
USA

Class with twlare

September 30th GC7CX8F Geocoinfest – Seattle 2018

Washington
USA

twlare will be
available for questions

October 6th GC7EXV6 Going Caching 2018

Georgia
USA

HikingSeal will be
available for questionsmake sure you get
one of our trading cards!

October 20thGCTBD Techevent

Agder
Norway

Beginner course with TBD
Class/workshop with thomfre

November 18th GC75D90 The Parkville Event 2018

Victoria
Australia

Talk with Bukkazoom67

Our economy

Running cachetur.no require a constant focus on our expenses, we want to provide you the best service we can, but we can’t consume more services than we are able to pay for. Right now, we have enough money to run the site. But we have seen a steady decrease in amount of donations during the summer. If this trend continues, we have to postpone or cancel some of the features we want to add, and possibly even reduce other offerings.

We still have a positive result for 2018, but it is not high enough to pay for the remainder of the expenses this year. We do however have enough saved up from earlier years, but that won’t last forever.

The app did cost a lot of money, which at the time of this writing had covered 76% of. That isn’t bad at all.

Thank you to all that have contributed, and made all of this possible!

Remember that all of us that work on this site (and app), including developer and all ambassadors, do this for free in our spare time. Cachetur.no does not pay anyone 🙂

thomfre

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This post is also available in: Norsk bokmål (Norwegian Bokmål) Deutsch (German)This blog post is our monthly(-ish) newsletter style blog post. Cachetur.no has always been open, and to ensure that we stay open we want Read more…

This post is also available in: Norsk bokmål (Norwegian Bokmål) Deutsch (German)This blog post is our monthly(-ish) newsletter style blog post. Cachetur.no has always been open, and to ensure that we stay open we want Read more…

This post is also available in: Norsk bokmål (Norwegian Bokmål) Deutsch (German)This blog post is our monthly(-ish) newsletter style blog post. Cachetur.no has always been open, and to ensure that we stay open we want Read more…